Build trust with your team

TRUST is one of the most important ingredients in building a relationship or a team. However, many people fall short in the trust department.

Ask yourself the following questions to see how trustworthy you are:

In the past month, have you promised to do something and did not fulfil it?

Do you arrive late for meetings and appointments? (Yes, even five minutes late is still late!)

Do your family members doubt what you say?

Do you often behave with inconsistency?

If you answered “yes” to any of the above statements, you really need to work on your trust level.

You may think that the standard set by these questions is unrealistically high, but the reality is that people do judge you by what you say or do – or don’t!

Be consistent

Building trust in a team or with the people you love boils down to one word: consistency.

Before any team can reach its peak potential, the team members must first be consistent in how they approach each other and do things.

This means that if everyone agrees to meet at 3pm, they show up at 3pm.

If some team members are late a few times, other members will start to doubt their trustworthiness.

They will ask: If the latecomers cannot be trusted with the basics, how can they be trusted with bigger things?

Keep your promises

Therefore, to build trust in a team, each member has to be mindful of making small agreements and keeping to them.

Be faithful in the little things, before you can do the bigger things.

A useful rule to stick by is: Say what you mean and mean what you say.

This builds consistency and credibility. People will know that they can always trust you to be consistent in what you say or do.

As a team leader, your trustworthiness and credibility is of the utmost importance. Your people take their cues from how you behave.

So when you make promises – such as to reward the team members when they achieve their targets, send a quotation to a client on time or sort out your team’s problems with another department – make sure you keep your word.

If your team members can’t trust their leader, they will become disillusioned.

They will stop working as a team and start looking out for themselves.

And a team that doesn’t work together will not achieve its goals, which you are ultimately accountable for.

So, build trust, build up your team and succeed together.

Article by Kenneth Kwan, an international speaker and trainer who specialises in creating attitude shifts using teambuilding programmes. For details, visit www.DeepImpactOnline.com/blog